Chapter 9 #4
“Five ten, one eighty, brown and brown, Nomex tactical suit, combat boots, K-bar in thigh sheath, Kimber 1911, three mags on the belt, latex gloves, so your guys probably won’t find prints.
He left in a real hurry, maybe my security cameras caught his face.
You could run it through the FBI’s facial recognition software, maybe come up with a hit.
” Sam frowned. “Come to think of it, my security cameras just outside the door fogged up around seven thirty and then a few minutes before nine. I didn’t think anything at the time, but he could have been using a—”
“Laser light,” Harry and Mike said at the same time.
The lieutenant grunted. “An operator.”
“Oh yeah,” Sam answered. “An operator. Got in and out real smooth.”
The lieutenant rested his elbows on his knees and fixed Nicole with a weary gaze. “So, we’ve got a pro breaking into your office, Ms. Pearce. What was he looking for?”
Nicole shook her head. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
“I have no idea, but he was definitely looking for something. He kept saying, ‘Where is it?’” She cleared her throat delicately.
“Actually, he kept saying, ‘Where the fuck is it?’ I have no idea what he was talking about. I tried to say so, but he just ground the gun more tightly against my head.”
All the men looked at her temple. “It’s okay,” she said to the room. “Just some torn skin, nothing serious.”
Sam closed his eyes in pain.
“So, the intruder was looking for something. For what? He didn’t come to steal those pretty knickknacks you’ve got, he was looking for something specific. What?” the lieutenant prodded.
Nicole shrugged her shoulders, baffled. “I can’t imagine.
I don’t think he was after the watercolors or the silver.
” It was true that she’d decorated the office very nicely, with two or three good pieces of family furniture, a little collection of solid sterling pen holders and an Art Déco leather desk set, all attractive pieces without, however, any real resale value.
The watercolors were lovely, but they were by her mother, who’d been talented but had never exhibited.
They had zero value on the open market. Nothing in the room had any real value if fenced, except maybe her desk.
But who would enter an office and steal a desk?
“Has anything been taken?” the lieutenant asked.
Nicole looked around her office and shook her head.
“Do you feel like checking that?”
Would her legs support her? Yes, they would, she found as she rose. Sam rose right along with her and shadowed her as she walked the perimeter of the room, opening drawers, carefully scrutinizing every surface. Sam stayed so close she could feel his body heat.
Finally, she made it back to the lieutenant.
“Okay. Everything’s where it should be. It looks like he didn’t have time…
” Nicole’s voice died away as she looked at her computer, head tilted.
She kept her desktop on a separate table, where she worked, and kept only her laptop on the desk, where she dealt with clients.
She used a Knoll office chair on wheels when at her desktop computer, and it was pulled away from the table. “That’s not right.”
All the men looked at her.
She walked over and touched the chair back, a foot from the table.
“I am absolutely positive I pushed the chair in under the desk before leaving. I always do. I like leaving the office in order. Do you think the man was after something in my computer?” Nicole looked up at Sam, then at the lieutenant.
Sam was already settling into the chair, reaching down to press the button that would turn the processor on. He pressed it and waited, frowning. He turned his head up to Nicole. Everyone had gathered around her computer. “I think he trashed your computer, Nicole.”
“No.” She pulled her portable hard disk drive from her purse.
“I use portable hard disk drives and always take them home with me, together with my laptop and backup files on a flash drive. I make my livelihood from my computer and I never leave anything behind in the office. My computer has some valuable software and can deal with a fairly broad range of alphabets, so I’d hate to lose that.
Plus, most of our contracts contain a confidentiality clause, so I make sure there’s a minimal degree of security. ”
At the word confidential, the lieutenant, Sam, Mike, Harry, the fingerprint tech and the medic pointed their faces at her monitor like hound dogs flushing birds.
“Fire it up,” Sam growled.
Nicole slid the portable hard disk drive into the designated slot and pressed the button to turn on the processor. There was utter silence in the room as the computer pinged and whirred its way to the home page of Wordsmith.
“Password,” she said, and the men averted their eyes while she entered the password to access her files. She had her files organized into clients, languages and translators. The men stared at the screen as if it could render up the secrets of the universe.
“What are we looking at here, ma’am?” the lieutenant finally asked.
Nicole gently nudged Sam with her hip and slid into the chair when he stood.
“Okay. What Wordsmith does is translate texts, from ten languages into ten languages. We work from English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Polish and Hungarian into the same languages.” She thought of Aidan Berry, who’d been one of her best friends at the Geneva School of Translation, had fallen in love with a painter in Reykjavik and used to work at an Icelandic bank, which, like all the other Icelandic banks, had gone belly-up.
“We also would offer economic translations from Icelandic into English, if Iceland still had an economy.”
She sat back, pleased. Wordsmith, her baby. It was pretty special. “Well, there you have it. It’s a fairly straightforward business.”
Six utterly blank male expressions. “What?”
The lieutenant pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Could you sort of run that by me again, ma’am?
” He nodded his head at the screen. “Show us what we’re seeing?
I can’t make any sense out of what’s on that screen, and we need to make sense of it.
Maybe a man was willing to commit murder for what’s in your computer. ”
He was right. If the intruder had been at her computer, he’d gone to a lot of trouble to get something.
And if he was after something…she drew in a shocked breath, swiveling her chair around to face the men.
“Oh my God. If he wanted something from my computer, he didn’t get it because the hard disk was in my purse. That means—”
“He’s coming back,” Sam said harshly. Nicole looked at the grave faces surrounding her. They’d come to this conclusion well before she had. She twisted her hands in her lap, suddenly icy cold.
This was not over.
Sam laid large, warm hands on her shoulders.
“He’s not getting to you again, though, honey.
I can guarantee you that.” She looked up at him.
He wasn’t smiling at her reassuringly, trying to make her feel better.
He looked grim. And deadly. Which actually did make her feel better.
“You’re coming home with me and you’re staying with me until this fu—asshole is caught. We straight on that?”
Sudden panic had slowed her thought processes, but one thing was clear. “I can’t leave my father, certainly not if he is in any danger. I simply can’t do it.”
Sam shifted until he could see her eyes. “Someone might be coming after you. You don’t want to take that danger to your father, do you? If this guy is willing to hurt you, believe me, he won’t balk at hurting your father.”
Oh God, no, he wouldn’t. Nicole remembered clearly the cold command in her attacker’s voice, the menace that emanated off him like vapor off ice, the utter steadiness of his movements.
He wasn’t a petty thief, frightened and in over his head.
An operator, Sam had said. By that he meant a man used to violence.
Nicole was not going to lead him to her father, but…
“He’ll need protection.” Just the thought of someone hurting her father made her stomach clench, cold sweat break out between her shoulder blades. “I can’t possibly leave him alone to face danger.”
“Mike?” Sam pivoted slightly to look his friend in the face.
Mike turned to the lieutenant. “Lieutenant?”
The lieutenant sighed. “Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Okay, I’ll post a couple of men around Ms. Pearce’s house. No one will get to her father.”
“Triple shifts,” Sam said.
The lieutenant winced. “Yeah. Christ, I don’t know where I’ll get six men from, but okay, I’ll try, at least. I can’t guarantee more than a couple of days, though. Couple days nothing happens, that’s it, you’re on your own.” He shrugged. “Sorry.”
“I’ll provide security after that,” Sam said. “I know some good men.”
Bodyguards, around the clock, indefinitely. Oh God, how could she afford this? Nicole balanced possible danger against certain bankruptcy and turned to Sam. Before she could open her mouth, though, Sam squeezed her shoulder. “I’ll take care of it,” he said softly.
The lieutenant had been speaking quietly into his cell. He flipped it closed and looked at Mike and Sam. “Six men, rotation of eight hours, for two days. Best I can do. They’ll be in place inside half an hour.”
“I’ll pick it up after that,” Sam said.
Nicole started to object, out of principle, when the lieutenant interrupted. “Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s see what the guy could have been looking for. So, show me how your system works, ma’am.”
Nicole switched gears. Wordsmith, her baby. The best way to describe it was to show it.